For 20 years Forced Entertainment has been creating theatre that smashes all theatrical conventions. The company is lauded on the Continent, yet it is curiously under-appreciated in this country, where its productions are often perceived as difficult and avant-garde. It has created a body of work in which performance and real life collide, conjuring the rituals we create to survive and the stories we spin to keep ourselves awake in the dying hours before dawn. If I have one image of Forced Entertainment, it is of drunken children gleefully raiding the dressing-up box, discovering that toy guns fire real bullets, their faces smeared with lipstick and glycerine tears as they realise the party is over but the performance has to go on.
In First Night, the company goes further than it has before. The spotlight is turned on the audience for a tawdry variety show in which everything goes wrong but the performers' smiles remain fixed, as on corpses where rigor mortis has set in.
This is a diverting, accessible and viciously funny performance that shows what happens when the performer's mask slips, the agreement between actor and audience lapses, the rules are broken and real life crosses the footlights. Instead of entertaining us, the actors bore us; instead of treating us like Dresden china they abuse us. The mind-reading act predicts death for most of the audience; the performers' conventional thanks to the audience becomes a litany of abuse.
It is interesting to see how far the company will go and how much the audience will take, how determinedly we keep our side of the bargain, how few of us tip up our seats and leave. How fascinating these fragile, glittering, tottering creatures remain, even when we have seen behind the pancake and sequins, and how we recognise our own vulnerable, embarrassed humanity in them. This is just the sort of show that we should be seeing at the National Theatre.
At the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster (01524 594151), October 23 and 24, then tours to Brighton, Warwick, Manchester and London.
